Introduction to Kentucky Slot Machine Casino Gambling in 2020
Kentucky slot machine casino gambling does not include games of chance, which are strictly illegal. Instead, Kentucky has competition-based electronic gaming machines at four out of its five pari-mutuel wagering racetracks.
Theoretical payout limits are not available but monthly return statistics are available for electronic gaming machines.
This post continues my weekly State-By-State Slot Machine Casino Gambling Series, an online resource dedicated to guiding slot machine casino gambler to success. Now in its third year, each weekly post reviews slots gambling in a single U.S. state, territory, or federal district.
The Basics Of How Slot Machine Work Slot machines in the past were mechanical – functioning according to an arrangement of gears and levers. After inserting a coin, the handle unlocks due to a coin detector system. Inside the machine one would find a metal shaft supporting the reels and connected to a handle mechanism. Slot makers create a 'Par sheet' for each slot which lists the reel symbols and the paytable. From this the payback can be calculated, and a programmer can write the computer code for the slot. This data is similar to the tables I provided above for my fictional slot. Learn how slots work. Despite the seeming variety, the general rules of every slot are the same.
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Relevant Legal Statutes on Gambling in Kentucky*
The minimum legal gambling age in Kentucky depends upon the gambling activity:
- Land-Based Casinos: Not available
- Poker Rooms: Not available
- Bingo: 18
- Lottery: 18
- Pari-Mutuel Wagering: 18
Kentucky’s interpretation of legal gambling requires the competitor’s level of skill “must sufficiently govern the results.”
Therefore, competition-based games are legal as well as pari-mutuel wagering. Traditional slots are illegal, including those referred to as Class III, Vegas-style, and games-of-chance slot machines.
Kentucky has competition-based electronic games available in a few of their pari-mutuel facilities. These skill-based games are anonymously-based historical race results.
Historically, Kentucky has had a fascinating relationship with gambling. While casino gambling was never legal, gambling dens were prevalent before the Great Depression of 1929. To this day, the open display of illegal gambling from that time in American history continues to negatively affect the perception of gaming in Kentucky.
If you’re ever in Newport, directly across the Ohio River from Cincinnati, consider walking the Newport Gangster Tour.
Research Articles On How Slot Machines Work At Home
*The purpose of this section is to inform the public of state gambling laws and how the laws might apply to various forms of gaming. It is not legal advice.
Slot Machine Private Ownership in Kentucky
Research Articles On How Slot Machines Work In
In Kentucky, it is legal to own a slot machine privately.
Gaming Control Board in Kentucky
The Kentucky Horse Racing Commission (KHRC) regulates skill-based games at pari-mutual racetracks in the Commonwealth of Kentucky.
These devices are Historic Horse Racing (HHR) electronic gaming machines. The KHRC reports Kentucky offers 2,981 HHR machines.
Casinos in Kentucky
There are five pari-mutuel racetracks in the Commonwealth of Kentucky. Of these, only four sites offer skill-based HHR electronic gaming machines.
The largest casino in Kentucky is Derby City Gaming with 1,000 HHR gaming machines.
The second-largest casino is Red Mile Gaming & Racing, an HHR parlor in partnership with Keeneland Race Course, with 938 gaming machines.
Commercial Casinos in Kentucky
The four out of five of Kentucky’s pari-mutuel racetracks with skill-based HHR electronic gaming machines are:
- Derby City Gaming in Louisville located 74 miles west of Lexington on the Indiana border.
- Ellis Park Racing and Gaming in Henderson located 105 miles northwest of Bowling Green.
- Kentucky Downs Gaming in Franklin located 29 miles south of Bowling Green.
- Red Mile Gaming & Racing in Lexington.
Tribal Casinos in Kentucky
The Commonwealth of Kentucky has no federally-recognized American Indian tribes and, therefore, no tribal casinos.
Other Gambling Establishments
As an alternative to enjoying Kentucky slot machine casino gambling, consider exploring casino options in a nearby state. Bordering Kentucky is:
- North: Indiana and Ohio Slots
- East: West Virginia Slots
- Southeast: Virginia Slots
- South: Tennessee Slots
- West: Missouri Slots
Each link above will take you to my blog for that neighboring U.S. state to Kentucky.
Our Kentucky Slots Facebook Group
Are you interested in sharing and learning with other slots enthusiasts in Kentucky? If so, join our new Kentucky slots community on Facebook. All you’ll need is a Facebook profile to join this closed Facebook Group freely.
There, you’ll be able to privately share your slots experiences as well as chat with players about slots gambling in Kentucky. Join us!
Payout Returns in Kentucky
The Commonwealth of Kentucky does not offer any theoretical payout limits for their competition-based HHR gaming machines.
The Kentucky Horse Racing Commission offers statistics for HHR gaming under Quick Links entitled Wagering on Historical Horse Races. Its December 2019 report indirectly offers actual return statistics including comparisons to past actuals.
To calculate a player’s win percentage from the report, divide Less: Return to Public by Total Handle. For December 2019, the monthly Player’s Win% for HHR machines were:
- State-wide: 91.5%
- Derby City: 90.9%
- Ellis Park: 93.9%
- Keeneland/Red Mile: 91.3%
- Kentucky Downs: 92.0%
From this December 2019 report, Ellis Park had the highest player win% at nearly 94% while Derby City had the lowest at nearly 91%.
Summary of Kentucky Slot Machine Casino Gambling in 2020
Kentucky slot machine casino gambling exists as competition-based, games-of-skill Historical Horse Racing (HHR) electronic gaming machines instead of games-of-chance slot machines.
No minimum or maximum theoretical payout limits have been set. Monthly return statistics are publicly available for each pari-mutuel racetrack with HHR games.
Annual Progress in Kentucky Slot Machine Casino Gambling
In the last year, Kentucky increased its HHR machines by 9% to 2,981 devices. However, the average daily handle for HHRs increased by 46%. For 2020 so far, it’s an amazing 59% increase compared to 2019.
Other State-By-State Articles from Professor Slots
- Previous: Kansas Slot Machine Casino Gambling
- Next: Louisiana Slot Machine Casino Gambling
Have fun, be safe, and make good choices!
By Jon H. Friedl, Jr. Ph.D., President
Jon Friedl, LLC
I spent part of last week on vacation from science in Las Vegas, where I thankfully avoided financial ruin due to some fortunate combination of genes, math awareness and a wife that has no interest in gambling. Sure, I dabbled a bit in games of chance, but as soon as I got a little bit ahead on the blackjack tables I ran for my life, knowing that the probability would even out hard in the long run. For those concerned about the financial well-being of Sin City, they still managed to turn a profit on us, thanks to the low-return temptations of fine dining and French circus acts set to Beatles megamixes. But most of our time was spent on the free entertainment of people-watching and stuff-watching, observing row after row of people almost hypnotically at work on loud, noisy slot machines amid fake New York, Paris and Venice scenery.
It doesn’t take a PhD in neurobiology to conclude that slot machines are designed to lure people into a money-draining repetition, just as it doesn’t take expertise in the casino business to realize slots are absurdly profitable – there’s a reason why they outnumber table games 100-to-1. But I wanted to go back to the scientific literature to confirm a faint glimmer of information I retained from graduate school, specifically that slot machines are masterful manipulators of our brain’s natural reward system. Every feature – the incessant noise, the flashing lights, the position of the rolls and the sound of the coins hitting the dish – is designed to hijack the parts of our brain designed for the pursuit of food and sex and turn it into a river of quarters. Or so I remember.
Fortunately, there is a robust amount of research into why slot machines are so addictive, despite paying out only about 75% of what people put in. They are, some scientists have concluded, the most addictive of all the ways humans have designed to gamble, because pathological gambling appears faster in slots players and more money is spent on the machines than other forms of gambling. In Spain, where gambling is legal and slot machines can be found in most bars, more than 20.3 billion dollars was spent on slots in 2008 – 44% of the total money spent by Spaniards on gambling last year.
That data was published earlier this month by a psychologist from the Universidad de Valencia named Mariano Choliz in the Journal of Gambling Studies. Yes, such a publication exists! In the background of the paper, Choliz outlines the tricks that slot machines use to keep people feeding them:
- Operating on a random payout schedule, but appearing to be a variable payout; i.e. fooling the player into thinking that the more money they play, the more likely they are to win.
- “The illusion of control” in pressing buttons or pulling a lever to produce the outcome.
- The “near-miss” factor (more on this below)
- Increased arousal (where the sounds and flashing lights come in)
- Able to be played with very little money; the allure of “penny” slots.
- And perhaps most importantly, immediate gratification.
This last point is the subject of Choliz’s experiment, which puts a group of ten pathological gamblers in front of two different slot machines. One machine produces a result (win or lose) 2 seconds after the coin was virtually dropped (it was computer program), the other delayed the result until 10 seconds after the gambler hit play. In support of the immediate gratification theory, gamblers played almost twice as long on the 2-second machines than they did on the 10-second machines…even though the 10-second machines paid out more money on average!
Choliz concluded that the immediacy of the reward was part of what kept people at slot machines, making them so addictive. The quick turnaround between action and reward also allows people to get into a repetitious, uninterrupted behavior, which Choliz compares to the “Skinner boxes” of operant conditioning – the specialized cages where rats hit a lever for food or some other reward. It seems like a cruel comparison, but after my three days walking through the casinos, not an inaccurate one.
Another trick up the slot machine’s sleeve was profiled earlier this year by a group of scientists from the University of Cambridge. In the journal Neuron, Luke Clark and colleagues examined the “near-miss” effect, the observation that barely missing a big payout (i.e. two cherries on the payline while the third cherry is just off) is a powerful stimulator of gambling behavior.
The Cambridge researchers put their subjects in an fMRI machine to take images of their brains while they played a two-roll slot machine game. When the players hit a match and won money, the reward systems of the brain predictably got excited – the activation of areas classically associated to respond to food or sex I mentioned earlier. When players got a “near-miss,” they reported it as a negative experience, but also reported an increased desire to play! That feeling matched up with activation of two brain areas commonly associated with drug addiction: the ventral striatum and the insula (smokers who suffer insular damage suddenly lose the desire to smoke).
Clark and co. conclude that near-misses produce an “illusion of control” in gamblers, exploiting the credo of “practice makes perfect.” If you were learning a normal task such as hitting a baseball, a “near-miss” foul ball would suggest that you’re getting closer – it’s better than a complete whiff, after all. But for a slot machine, where pulling the lever has no impact on the rolls other than to start them moving and start the internal computer calculating, a “near-miss” is as meaningless as any miss.
Nevertheless, it’s this type of “cognitive distortion,” as Clark and colleagues name it, that makes slot machines such effective manipulators of our brains. Those massive, gaudy casino-hotels that I wore out a pair of shoes strolling through last week weren’t just built on a crafty use of probability, they were built on a exploitation of brain functions we are only just beginning to understand.
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